Does Movie Maker support IRay?

tring01

I'm looking for solutions to practical animation with Daz3d assets.  I'm very interested in something that works with IRay rendering as the results are light years better that 3Dlight in my experience.  I'm looking at Movie Maker, but all the promotional information for it uses Victoria 4, dates back to 2009, and looks to be rendered in 3Dlight.  I've had some bad experiences with older assets and plug-ins from the Genesis days (looing at you DressShop).  Not sure I want to gamble on Movie Maker.  Anyone have any experience with it in Daz 4.8 witih IRay rendered assets?

grinch2901

I don't have the product but I beleive what they did was take a spherical projection of a DAZ scene (you can do this, for example, by rendering using a sperical camera in Cararra) and laying that on a dome as a texture. In this way it looks like you are standing in the middle of a 360 degree 3-D environment. Then they provided a set of lights that match the lights they rendered the environment in, so your character looks properly lit in the scene.

So I would imagine there are two problems. First, the background is pre-rendered in something other than Iray so it won't look like an Iray background. Second, the matching light rig won't be Iray photmetric lights so they might not match the background "out of the box". 

In the Freebies section, mCasual was working on a script to create these sorts of spherical projections in Studio so hypothetically that could be used to generate an Iray equivalent to the Movie Maker sets but it seems he never really got it to a user-friendly state yet.  Good luck!

tring01

Thanks.  Yeah, you describe many of my concerns.

I spent quite a while fiddling around trying to get sky domes to work in iRay.  I found some images could be loaded via the sky dome channel in the iRay render tab.  I had my best success with a stock, free to use, starfield I found on Renderosity.  It took a lot of fiddling around but finally worked great as the background for a space battle scene.  Then I tried a number of terrestrial sky domes with clouds and a horizon.  Never achieved any decent results.  Some would just be black no matter what I did with them.  Some would be too blurry.  Finally gave up and have been using the IRay Sun Sky mode.  It lights the scene well, but you need to put an asset in the scene as a backdrop.  Hmmm....